![Coal-fired Power Plant [by Stanze, From Flickr.com]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/coal-fired-power-plant.jpg)
When does saving one of anything ever result in actually saving three or four? When we're talking about electricity, of course. The reason is simple: Most of our electricity comes from the burning of fuels like coal and natural gas.…
A home with an attached garage is usually a home in which people breathe more carbon monoxide (CO). Of course, having an open carport or detached garage is better for air quality (and a feature that usually gets points for…
Halloween can be a lot of fun. Well, let me soften that a bit - Halloween can be fun if you don't stuck doing an energy audit of a haunted house, as I did one year. If you're in the…
When I wrote about the debate over the terms 'building envelope' vs. 'building enclosure' a couple of weeks ago, I favored the former but overall felt agnostic on whether we should choose one over the other. I didn't think I'd…
Ah, textbooks, those compendia of facts and figures that we lug around when we're in school. We do multitudinous homework assignments out of them and spend countless hours trying to make sense of the great collections of information within them.…
The most terrified I've ever been was was the time I got called to do a home energy audit of the haunted house-as-a-system down the street. I still shudder when I think of that night. Yes, it was nighttime. The…
I'm a white male. I know, I know. You saw my name and thought I was woman. It's not the first time that's happened. My 10th grade biology teacher refused to believe that I was Allison Bailes on the first…
It's not that hard really, at least in principle. You want to reduce the air leakage in your home so you keep the conditioned air inside and the cold air outside this winter. What's the advice of all those stories…
If you travel down into the building science vortex, you start discovering that people argue over a lot of things that most people never think twice about. Wait. Most people probably never think once about these things. Earlier this year…
Yesterday I read a short interview with Rick Fedrizzi,* the CEO of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), and it got me to thinking about that organization. They're probably the largest, most well known green building organization in the world.…